Proponents of nuclear energy are visibly pleased that debate over its use has to some extent subsided. Influenced by climate change and the explosion of oil prices, the tone has become more "sober and composed". Friends of nuclear-based electricity production are especially gratified about one thing: that the discussion on nuclear policy has shifted from the fundamental problems of safety and security to issues associated with the economy, environmental protection, and resource conservation. They would like to see a shift in public opinion toward viewing nuclear power as one technology among many, to be weighed like coal-fired power plants or windmills.
Nuclear fission is settling into the triangle that economists use to frame the debate on energy policy; namely economic feasibility, reliable supply, and environmental compatibility. Its supporters are more pleased than disturbed by the fact that even within this framework, many questions remain about the advisability of nuclear power. As far as they are concerned, the main point is that it has become increasingly possible to conceal nuclear energy's unique potential for catastrophe behind a wall of arguments that distract from the basic issues of safety and security. This development is no coincidence but rather the result of a deliberate and tenacious strategy pursued for years by operators and vendors in the major nuclear power producing countries.
Successful diversionary tactics may calm public debate but do not reduce the probability of a major disaster. The risk of a major accident, i.e. one that exceeds the greatest anticipated accident that safety systems are designed for, combined with the fact that accidents can never be excluded, will always remain the primary source of conflict about nuclear energy. It is ultimately the basis for all arguments against this form of energy conversion. Acceptance - regional, national, and global - is dependant upon it.
Since Harrisburg, and even more so since Chernobyl, the nuclear industry has held out the promise of accident-proof nuclear reactors in an effort to regain public acceptance. A quarter of a century ago, reactor builders formulated this promise in the coded terms of an "inherently safe nuclear power plant". The Americans called these future plants "walk-away" reactors, claiming that the possibility of a core melt or similarly serious accident could be physically excluded. "Even if the worst of all conceivable accidents takes place," enthused the vice president of a US reactor vendor at the time, "you could go home, eat lunch, take a nap, and then return to take care of it - without the slightly concern or panic."1 This grandiose statement remains, as it was then, an unredeemed pledge against the future. In 1986, the German historian of technology Joachim Radkau was already suggesting that the accident-proof nuclear power plant was "a pie in the sky produced in times of crisis but never achieved.2
The European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) and the ten countries that operate nuclear power plants already speak in neutral terms of "Generation IV" when they address the future of reactor technology. This next but one series of reactors, furnished with innovative safety systems, is no longer said to be idiot-proof like its forerunners that never materialised but is supposed to be more economical, smaller, less susceptible to military misuse and consequently more acceptable to public opinion. The first reactors of this series are supposed to start providing electricity around the year 2030 -that is the official version at least. Unofficially, even some of the more prominent backers do not expect commercial operation to start "until 2040 or 2045". 3
1 Cited in Peter Miller, "Our Electric Future - A Comeback for Nuclear Power", in National Geographic, August 1991, p. 60ff. Retranslated from German.
2 "Chernobyl in Deutschland?" in Spiegel 20/1986; pp. 35-36
This promise for the future fatally repeats that made by fusion researchers back in 1970 when they predicted that nuclear fusion, i.e. a controlled fusion of hydrogen atoms like that which transpires in the sun, would be generating electricity by the year 2000. Today, no one is saying anything about commercialising nuclear fusion before the middle of the 21st century - if at all.
By promising a fourth generation of reactors without absolute safety, the nuclear industry has quietly abandoned its past guarantees. In the meantime, routine discussion is even satisfied with relative safety, specifically the blanket assertion improperly understood but gladly repeated by non-specialists, "our nuclear power plants are the safest in the world". The veracity of this statement - especially popular in Germany - has not really been substantiated. It is not especially plausible that nuclear power plants whose construction was launched in the 1960s and 1970s, which means they were designed on the basis of knowledge and technology from the 1950s and 1960s, can in fact provide an adequate level of safety. But as long as no one prevents the advocates of nuclear power in France, the USA, Sweden, Japan, and South Korea from claiming exactly the same thing about their own reactors, everyone is satisfied.
There is no national "nuclear community" that does not place its own power plants at the forefront of world technology - or at least publicly claim this distinction. In Eastern Europe, claims also circulate with ever greater frequency that the retrofitting programs of the past 15 years have boosted Soviet-style reactors up to Western safety standards and in certain respects even beyond. For example, they are said to be less sensitive to failures in the reactor's physical processes. There is no need for formal agreement on these official versions because the common message is that there is no reason for alarm and furthermore, the level of alarm is indeed declining, both nationally and internationally. The crucial question that remains is the price that humanity is ready to pay for this calm on the nuclear front.
What does it mean for international reactor safety if near-disasters like that at Paks are only discussed among closed circles of specialists? Advocates of nuclear power have even been known to ascribe the comparatively high levels of safety at German plants to, among other things, the strength of the anti-nuclear movement in West Germany and a stubbornly sceptical attitude toward reactors on the part of a well-informed public. According to this view, probing queries and the growth of "critical informed public opinion" were what enabled nuclear plants to acquire the most sophisticated safeguards against accidents and incidents in the history of technology, which they still have today. However, if this is so, then the reverse must also apply - if public awareness declines, so too will safety.
Twenty years after Chernobyl, what does a realistic safety review now look like? After the heightened attention to risks following the core melt in the Ukraine, have real advances been made in reactor safety? Or is the opposite the case; namely that the next major accident is already in the cards?
Nobody can deny that the nuclear sector, like everything else, has benefited from general advances in technological development. The revolution in information and communications technology that has occurred since most of the world's commercial reactors were built has made control and monitoring processes clearer, and routine operations more reliable. When the older plants still operating today were being designed, computers were still at the punched-tape stage. Modern control systems have been and are being retroactively installed into many plants, including older ones. Computer simulations and experiments can shed light on the physics and other complex factors in normal reactor processes, all the more so in the event of malfunctions. These days, reactor operators use simulators to practice accident responses that could not even be modelled twenty or thirty years ago - some were not even known then. Safety technicians also benefit from advanced probability analyses and further developments in testing and monitoring systems, which are gradually being retrofitted into older plants as well.
3 Then EDF President Francois Roussely on 23 November 2003 to the Economic and Environmental Committee of the French National Assembly, cited in Mycle Schneider, Der EPR aus französischer Sicht. Memo im Auftrag des BMU, p. 5.
Reactor operators are also determined to learn from the mistakes of the past. They point to the founding of the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO), which organises an exchange of information as well as the rapid transmission of accident data to its members. Operators can make use of experience from over 11,000 reactor-operating years worldwide but this is no assurance of a "new level of safety" for nuclear power plants. The fact that there have been no accidents involving core melts since Chernobyl and Harrisburg does not mean that one could not happen again. The accident at Paks has been the sharpest reminder in recent years.
Approximately three out of four reactors currently in use were also operating back in 1986. The nature of probability calculations is precisely that a serious accident could either happen today, or not until one hundred years from now. Eleven thousand reactor-operating years are therefore no evidence to the contrary. When the nuclear industry suffered its first core melt at the Harrisburg commercial plant in 1979, antinuclear protesters in southern Germany distributed flyers that mocked the engineers' big safety assurances with bitter irony: "An accident only once every 100,000 years - how quickly time flies!" Managers such as Harry Roels, the CEO of the German energy group RWE call efforts to extend reactor licences around the world "completely tenable in terms of safety technology". 4 Walter Hohefelder, CEO of the nuclear power plant operator E.ON Ruhrgas and president of the German Atomic Energy Forum, explained in all seriousness that extending reactor licences makes "electricity supply more secure". 5
4 Frankfurter Rundschau, 12 August 2005, p.11
5 Berliner Zeitung, 9 August 2005, p. 6
The astonishing thing about such statements is that large segments of the public no longer question them. For reactor operators to convey the impression that nuclear power plants - in contrast to cars or airplanes - become safer with age is an audacious undertaking. Not only does common sense mitigate it, but also so, unfortunately, do the laws of physics.
The global reactor fleet is "ageing". This innocuous term is like a facade that covers an entire edifice of expertise about material and metal technology. These disciplines do not just deal with simple "wear", but rather with highly complex changes to the surface and the substance of metallic materials. These processes and their consequences are very difficult to calculate on an atomic level. It is also very difficult for monitoring systems to identify them reliably, and above all promptly, when high temperatures, strong mechanical loads, aggressive chemical environments and ongoing neutron bombardment from nuclear fission are all working simultaneously on components that are crucial to safety. Corrosion, radiation damage, and fissuring of both surfaces and the welded seams of central components have all occurred over the past decades. Serious accidents are often avoided because damage is discovered just in time by monitoring systems or by routine checks during down times and repairs. Sometimes these discoveries are made purely by chance.
We must also consider the effects that deregulated electricity markets in many of the countries have nuclear power plants. Deregulation leads to higher "cost awareness" in every individual plant with very concrete consequences, such as personnel layoffs, longer intervals between checks, and shorter deadlines with the attendant time pressure for repairs and fuel rod replacements. None of this enhances safety.
In summary, if reactor operators get their way and succeed in having plant licences extended to 40 or even 60 years, the current worldwide average reactor age of 22 years will double or even triple in the future. This will substantially increase the overall risk of serious accident. Constructing new plants of the so-called "Generation III" will change little. For decades, they will make up only a small percentage of the world's reactor fleet and they are not physically immune to serious accidents either. Critics' say that the European Pressurized Water Reactor (EPR) under design since the late 1980s, - a prototype of which is being built in Finland - is a half-hearted further development of the pressurized reactors operated in France and Germany since the 1980s. The EPR is designed to stem the consequences of a core melt by means of a sophisticated containment unit ("core catcher"). Because this design entails considerable extra costs, the dimensions had to be progressively enlarged in order for the plant to be at least more economical than its predecessors. Whether the containment, which is based on standards from the latest German series (KONVOI), could withstand the deliberate crash of fully tanked passenger jet remains open to question.
Not even reactor operators really believe that greater operating experience and the longer operating lives of individual plants reduce the likelihood of serious accident. At a 2003 meeting of the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO) in Berlin, participants listed eight "serious incidents" in the preceding few years that had raised concern - albeit primarily among reactor experts alone, as was the case with the above-discussed accident at Paks. The list of incidents with potentially disastrous results included the following:
- Leaks in the control rods of the newest British reactor Sizewell B (which started operating in 1995);
- Insufficient boron concentration in the emergency cooling system of the Philippsburg-2 reactor in Baden-Württemberg;
- Fuel assembly damage of a type never seen before, in block 3 of the French Cattenom power plant;
- A serious hydrogen explosion in a pipe at the Brunsbüttel boiling water reactor, in the immediate vicinity of a reactor pressure vessel;
- Massive corrosion on a reactor pressure vessel at the Davis-Besse plant in the USA, long overlooked, where only the thin stainless steel liner prevented a massive leak; o Falsification of safety data at the British reprocessing facility in Sellafield;
- Similar data falsification associated with the Japanese operator Tepco
These types of incidents and negligence - and especially their greater frequency in the recent past - are making operators noticeably more worried and problem-conscious than political advocates of a renaissance in nuclear energy. Those in charge of running the reactors fear the consequences of a phenomenon deeply rooted in human nature; namely susceptibility to the gentle poison of routine, which makes it nearly impossible to perform the same activities over years with the same maximum degree of concentration. At the WANO conference in Berlin, speakers complained not only about the considerable financial consequences of malfunctions (around US$298 million by October 2003 for the incidents in Philippsburg, Paks, and Davis-Besse alone; 12 of the 17 boiling water reactors run by the Japanese operator Tepco were shut down in connection with data falsification investigations), but even more so about carelessness and complacency by operators. Both "threaten the continued existence of our business", 6 warned a Swedish participant at the expert meeting. The Japanese president of WANO at the time, Hajimu Maeda, even diagnosed a "terrible malaise" that threatened the business from within. It starts with the loss of motivation, complacency, and "carelessness in upholding a culture of safety due to severe cost pressures resulting from deregulated electricity markets." This malaise must be acknowledged and countered. Otherwise at some point "a serious accident... will destroy the entire industry". 7
6 Nucleonics Week: 6 August 2003. Retranslated from German.
7 ibid.
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